31 Days: Break It Down

As much as I love a good list, to-do lists can get overwhelming. That having been said, I’m a fan of making a long list impossibly long by breaking down certain tasks into manageable, realistic steps.

For example, yesterday I knew that I needed to bake up some biscuits.

Since I was up about an hour earlier than I needed to be, I knew I had a little extra time, but not necessarily enough to finish the task. Rather than put the whole thing off until later in the day, I figured I might as well mix up the dry ingredients. (That in and of itself makes every baking task so much more feasible, mentally, in my book. If the dry ingredients are measured and waiting for me, it’s almost as good as done.) Once that was done, well, only five minutes had passed; plenty of time to at least mix up the dough and cut the biscuits. They could sit on their cookie sheets in the fridge for a couple of hours if need be, and baking them off later would be a breeze!

Except, as it turns out, there was still enough time to get them into the oven before lunch-packing began. How ’bout that? It didn’t take nearly as long as I’d thought! On top of that, if I’d waited until later in the day, it probably would have ended up lumped in with a bunch of other stuff that absolutely had to get done right that minute and would’ve been much more stressful than it needed to be.

I’m very guilty of letting things get out of hand until they’re much more stressful than they need to be.

So, friends, that is my encouragement to you today: Break it down, chip away at it, and you’ll be done before you know it.